LuxSci FYI Blog

by Erik Kangas, PhD, CEO

Posts Tagged ‘spam’

You thought email was a simple concept, but you are at once confronted with a plethora of acronyms and jargon like POP, IMAP, WebMail, Aliases, Forwards, SMTP, IMAP, POP, Quota, SPAM, TLS, SSL, Archival, and more! This article describes the ins and outs of email, explains these terms, and helps you figure out what services and features you need from your personal or business email service provider.

Businesses of all sizes use general purpose email addresses, like info@company.com or support@company.com, as conduits for information, Support, Sales, Billing, and other requests from customers. On the surface, there is an apparently very good reason for this: many customers appreciate the simplicity of being able to send an email message. It’s best to be as flexible as possible and reduce the time that the customer must spend to get a response, right?

There are actually many significant downsides to accepting general customer requests via email; downsides which can actually cause friction, slow the response process, or result in missed opportunities. We will cover many of these issues, below. The solution, is to use targeted specific web-based forms to collect customer requests; we will also discuss why this is a better approach.

“GrayMail” sounds like either some shriveled up husk of an email message, or the undead ghost of messages coming back to haunt me. Both concepts are not far off the mark.

Spam is easy to define – mail that you do not want and have never asked to receive.

GrayMail is legitimate bulk mail that was requested by you in the past (even if you don’t remember doing so), but which you no longer want. Graymail is generally not considered spam, yet
it represents a significant nuisance and often the unsubscribe options provided fail to work (or you may not want to use “unsubscribe” as you are afraid of inviting more unwanted email).

Many major Internet Service Providers (e.g. AOL, Hotmail, MSN, Comcast, etc.) have FBLs “feedback loops” for reporting SPAM complaints by their users. I.e. if a user “marks a message as Spam”, information about that message and the fact that it was considered “Spam” by the recipient can be sent back to the originating email server, for example LuxSci.

LuxSci has participated in feedback loops for a long time . Now we have greatly extended our participation by:

We have discussed how email messages should not be expected to arrive instantly. This naturally brings to mind “text messages” (aka SMS messages) that people send to their cell phones. These are commonly expected to be delivered “instantly” — but that is also not always the case. While text messages are generally very fast, and usually more quickly delivered than email messages, they are not always “instant”.

Users of LuxSci’s Premium Email Filtering service now have a new and very powerful weapon to stop this kind of spam — “SPF-enabled allow list entries”.

This feature allows you to easily receive protection from forged spam messages while at the same time ensuring that legitimate messages sent between users in your organization are not filtered or caught as spam.

Web Bugs are images in HTML-formatted email messages that, when viewed, tell the sender of the message that you read the message. This mechanism of obtaining an essentially covert confirmation that (a) your email address is valid, (b) the email got past your filters, and (c) you actually read the message, is pervasively used by Spammers to identify what addresses are reading their messages.

LuxSci has updated the optional Quarantine Reports that are sent to users of its Basic Spam and Virus Filtering service. These reports, once enabled, send users a daily email listing any new Spam and/or Virus messages caught by the filters and saved in separate Spam and Virus folders.

In addition to an improved look and feel, several new features are now available in these reports.

Email security issues and technologies are extremely complicated; however, here we intend to make the salient issues and solutions clearly understandable to all readers.

You may already know that email is not a perfectly secure communication medium; however, it might surprise you to learn just how inherently insecure email can be. Messages thought deleted can still exist in backup folders on remote servers years after being sent. Hackers can read and modify messages in transit, use your usernames and passwords to login to your online services, and steal your identity and critical information!

As the amount of crucial business conducted via email increases, so does the amount of Spam, viruses, hacking, fraud, and other malicious activity. Unless precautions are taken, email can leave you and your business open to escalating security and privacy risks. What are these risks?

We recently talked about the problems created by backscatter or bounce back spam. I.e. the pain caused by getting lots of "delivery failure" messages for messages that you never sent, but which arrive at your door anyway. One of the solutions we have provided for dealing with backscatter, if you have this problem, is to create a custom email filter in your LuxSci WebMail interface that will delete or save all bounce messages. While this works well, it also has a drawback.